


Gentlemen of Leisure

by apprenticenanoswarm



Category: The Flash (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 07:40:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18048401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apprenticenanoswarm/pseuds/apprenticenanoswarm
Summary: Having fun is harder than it looks.





	Gentlemen of Leisure

The time has come to take Digger to a classy hotel.

A classy hotel, not a classy-by-Digger’s-standards hotel. Because boy o boy, good old Digs has dragged Sam into some spooky-ass places on the grounds that ‘bloody hell, Sammy, they’ve got those flat tellies! And room service says they do  _three_  types of coffee! Landed with our arses in the butter, eh?’

Enough is enough. This time, Sam wants to blow his doltish partner-in-crime’s mind. It’s an act of altruism, really. He’s expanding Digger’s horizons; opening him up to new experiences. And maybe  _opening him up_  literally as well, with any luck. Sam’s an eternal optimist.

So in the wake of their most successful heist in six months, Sam hops into a mirror, steps out in Switzerland, dons a disguise and books a weekend in the Hotel President Wilson’s Royal Penthouse Suite for enough money to build a house.

Not buy a house. Build a house. A house made of stacks of money. A fucking enormous stacks-of-money house. Never let it be said that Samuel Joseph Scudder doesn’t know how to treat his boyfriend right.

As is Sam’s wont, he’s got the whole weekend planned out. Sex on the bed. Hiking. Sex in the bath. Spa and massages. Sex against the wall. Tennis. Sex in the shower. Rinse. Repeat. It’ll be a blast.

And then he gets Digger there and…

“What’s wrong?” Sam asks, flopping down onto the delightfully soft, squishy bed.

Digger stands in the middle of the room, looking weird.

Well. Weirder than Captain Boomerang usually looks.

Mostly because this time the weirdness isn’t to do with his costume or his bizarre array of ‘rangs or his general goofiness, but more to do with the fact that Sam can’t interpret the look on his face. It’s one he hasn’t seen before.

Worrisome. He thought he’d seen all of Digger’s expressions.

“This is it, is it?” Digger mutters.

Sam spreads his arms, ta-da!-style. “Ain’t it grand?”

Digger swallows, brows furrowed. “It’s…really somethin’, mate.”

Mate. Digger never calls him mate unless they’re about to die. Quickly, Sam scans the room to determine what could be making him so uncomfortable. This place is a palace. A gilded marvel. A temple to the God of Obnoxious Opulence. What aspect of it could possibly disturb the sensibilities of the world’s least sensitive man? Nothing that he can see. Not an errant trace of dust, not a single piece of furniture or linen that costs less than the annual wage of the average American. The view is fantastic. The mirror is large enough for them to both to jump through if the Flash shows up, which he won’t.

Slapping a hand over his face and collapsing back onto the mattress, Sam heaves a weary sigh. “Digs. Boomer. Baby. C’mon. What’s wrong?”

Digger shifts from foot to foot. “Nothing. S’fine.”

“Digs.”

“It’s a bit much, isn’t it?” Digger blurts out.

Sam opens his eyes and squints at the ceiling. “Gonna need you to explain that one, buddy.”

“The…the bed. Looks like something they got out of Buckingham bloody Palace. And that chair, that’s got to be an antique. What if I sit on it wrong and break it? Probably get more prison time for that than for all the robberies I’ve ever done put together. And – and everything’s so white and shiny – what if I get fingerprints on it? I’ll do a brick, Sam! They’ll gimme the lethal injection! Fuck, I should’ve taken my boots off before stepping on this carpet.”

He hastily sets about doing so. Sam boggles in amazement. In all the years they’ve known one another, Digger has never expressed the slightest smidgen of remorse about painting the floor of Sam’s lair with muddy footprints or leaving his kitchen looking like a goddamn garbage dump.

“Still don’t get it, Digs. I mean, yeah, it’s a nice place. That’s the point. We’ve got cash to spare, why not treat ourselves? Go check out the size of the bath!  _Think_ of all the naughty stuff we can get up to in that!”

Dutiful but clearly not enthusiastic, Digger walks across the room – eyes on his socked feet like a man moving through a minefield – until he reaches the bathroom. Upon entering it, there’s an ominous lull before he makes a noise eerily similar to the one he made that time a cop shot a hole in his stomach. A moment later he launches himself out, slamming the door behind him. Horror writ large all over his face, he wails, “I can’t bath in that! Christ, those tiles! The shower’s got a computer in it! Sam,  _we need to leave_!”

“Why?”

“Aaw, c’mon, Sammy,” he whines. “This isn’t my kinda place. All this stuff, all this…everywhere I look, I see something I might break or bugger up.”

Scoffing, Sam gets up. “You’re being an idiot. Chill. Let’s get them to bring us some champagne and steak. You’ll feel at home in no time.”

Sam takes an hour-long shower, using every one of the seventeen body oils and creams the hotel has made available, and comes out wrapped in a lavender silk robe and smelling like an angel to find Digger sitting cross-legged on the floor, still fully dressed.

“That couch looks like it belongs in some wanky art museum. Don’t trust it,” he says, as though that explains anything.

Sam goes and tests it out. It’s a very nice couch. He would really, really like to persuade Digger to fool around on it.

Maybe food will help?

0

Food does not help.

The delicious steak only makes Digger more nervous. He eats it in tiny slivers, chewing slowly as though obliged to squeeze every ounce of taste from every last mouthful. It’s so damn odd. Sam’s seen Digger devour the most horrendous, artery-clogging filth with gusto and glee. What’s even worse is that now Digger’s apparently decided he’s got to at least pretend to be enjoying himself, so he keeps saying how great it is, how great the room is, and there’s this awful dead smile on his face. It’s making Sam’s skin crawl.

This, Sam decides, is one of those important relationship moments that needs to be navigated with compassion and care.

So he snatches the remaining lump of Digger’s steak, throws it over his shoulder where it lands on the carpet with a wet squelch, climbs into Digger’s lap and says lovingly, “Explain to me in simple words why you don’t like it here or I’ll strangle you.”

Digger squirms. “Already did.”

“No, honey, I want you to explain properly this time. Why is it a problem that we’re surrounded by expensive things? We’re fucking supervillains. We steal and destroy expensive things all the time.”

“Not the same,” Digger mumbles. “Just…I can’t explain it, alright? I know it doesn’t make sense.”

Sam leans forward, nuzzles his stubbled cheek, then bites his nose. Hard.

“ _Ow_! Evil little blighter!”

“Explain,” Sam growls.

“Christ. Fuck. Fine. I’ll try. I mean…you already know I grew up in the arse-end of nowhere, yeah? People think of Straya, they think ‘bout kangaroos and racism, and that’s pretty much it.”

Cautiously, Sam nods.

Digger chews his lip. “Thing is, there’s actually three Strayas, all totally different. There’s Boring Straya – Canberra and places like that. There’s Sydney Straya. And then there’s Gawd-help-us Straya. I’m from the last one. When I was a kid, right, my mum had this homemaker’s magazine. She only brought about one a year and she kept them forever. We couldn’t afford comic books or anything so I ended up reading ‘em all over and over. And…in this one, there was a picture. I mean, there were lots of pictures, obviously, but this one picture stuck in my head. It was of a house. A mansion. There was an article to go with it and the article had smaller pictures, showing the garden, the bedroom, the bathroom, the lot of it. Every time I looked at that house, I tried to decide if it was a photo or an amazingly, bloody incredibly realistic picture some genius had drawn, because I didn’t think places like that really existed. I couldn’t see how they  _could_ exist. I looked at the thick white carpet and the big black lab sleeping on it and I thought, ‘Nah, that’s fake. No way would anyone ever let a mutt onto that’. I looked at the bath and I thought: ‘Nah, that’s bollocks, how would they ever have enough water to fill that up?’. I didn’t understand, y’see. In my house, when we wanted to get clean, we used this plastic pink bucket. Spoonful of soap for everyone to share. When we wanted to wash our clothes…well, mostly we didn’t, because they lasted longer if you didn’t wash ‘em. But if they got so filthy we had to wash ‘em, we used the same bucket we washed in. And if my mum or dad had a hangover and lay in bed tellin’ me to get something for them to be sick into, I’d run off and get the same bucket. It was like a Swiss Army Bucket. Once, we needed something heavy to keep the door shut because the latch was broken. I had the clever idea of going out into the sticks with the bucket and using it to carry home the biggest rock I could find. I found one. Perfect size. Got it in the bucket. Halfway home, it  _broke through_ the bottom of the bloody bucket because it was so heavy and it landed on my fucking foot and broke my toe. I was bleeding everywhere – could barely walk – and I didn’t give a fuck. When I started snivelling, the thing I was snivelling about was the goddamned cocking bloody bucket. I knew, see, I knew in my heart that it was the bucket my mum and dad would be most upset about. And I was fucking right. Gave me a lecture and a slap. Didn’t even notice my toe until the next day…”

Digger trails off, scratching a spot on his neck.

Well. What does a man say to that?

“Sounds shitty,” Sam contributes, and mentally hands himself the Boyfriend of the Year Award.

Digger breathes out, as if the response he was expecting was somehow even lousier than that one.

“Yeah. It was. Anyway, all that crap was to make a point. To me, this place is just too fucking weird, Sammy. Stealing a diamond – I can wrap my head around that. Stealing a necklace made of diamonds – Gawd, wouldn’t that be something? But being here is like I’ve been teleported to the surface of a planet-sized diamond. Nothing makes sense. I can’t relax.”

Sam reaches across to the counter where he left his cigarettes.

“Sam!” says Digger, aghast.

“What?”

“You can’t smoke in here! What if the smell gets into the linen? What if they’re watching us, Sam?”

Digger glances at the door as though expecting the concierge to stride in with a shotgun.

Enough is enough, Sam decides.

He lights a cigarette, blows a plume of smoke, and gets to his feet. “Okay. Let’s go. I’ll get the towels and the adorable little soaps, you get the rugs and whatever’s in the fridge. Also that clock, I want that for the lair. Len’ll hate it so much.”

Eyes wide, Digger says, “You mean it? We can go? You’re not pissed off at me?”

“Oh, drop dead,” says Sam, flicking his ear. “C’mon, let’s get moving. I have things I need to do to you tonight.”

They’re professional supervillains. It barely takes them five minutes to clean the place out. The last thing they snatch are the remains of the steak – sure, it’s been on the floor, but the floor is marble and cleaner than most of the plates Sam eats off, so what the hell – and the champagne. Laden down with their loot, they hop into the mirror and emerge in Sam’s lair.

Setting down four rugs, two paintings, an ornate vase filled to the brim with tiny beverages taken from the mini-fridge and one  _ **fancy**_ fucking clock, Digger gives Sam an avaricious grin.

Good. That’s a much better look on him.

“Not bad for a night’s work, me old partner-in-crime,” says Digger, stretching.

“Not bad at all,” says Sam, slipping off his silk robe.


End file.
